Public laws have for over ten years prohibited certain test and manufacturing operations to be performed in the United States relating to chemical warfare agents. To avoid the total abandonment of progress in modern chemical weaponry, at the risk of allowing potential enemy forces to confront the world with a future threat of superiority in this technology which the United States might be unable to meet or counter, binary weapon systems have been adopted as a reasonable alternative.
The binary technique involves the design of missile or projectile warheads so as to accommodate two or more non-toxic chemicals or reagents which, when mixed together, combine to form a lethal or toxic agent. These reagents are separately contained in isolation from each other within the warhead until it is fired in combat. However, since many warheads are relatively small, as little as 8 inches in diameter, mixing mechanisms must be commensurately small in size to fit within such warheads. In addition, the time available for mixing during traverse of the warhead from gun muzzle to target is so brief that mixing must be extremely rapid. Moreover, since any unmixed portions of the reagent are harmless and ineffective against enemy targets, it follows that the mixing must be 100 percent complete before target impact or burst. These three major constraints of small space, brief time, and maximum efficiency in combining the reagents, produce a serious design challenge which the invention in this case addresses with most remarkable success.